Liberals Can’t Get Less Condescending
One of my friends was getting frustrated on facebook, saying — effectively — if liberals didn’t get their heads out of their asses, and stop being so condescending, we were going to lose the 2022 elections, and probably 2024 as well.
I get those feels.
Only thing is, I don’t think it’s possible for liberals to get less condescending, and even if they could, it wouldn’t have the impact he wants.
Because here’s the thing; a bunch of conservatives get power off of pushing the narrative that liberals are condescending, so no matter how much liberals change their behavior, there is no way they will ever be perceived as “less condescending” in the culture at large.
I realized this when making a “reaction to the news” video on my YouTube yesterday, and I came across and article about how liberals supposedly reacted to the news of tornadoes in Kentucky. Basically, Matt Vespa (author of the article) quoted a few liberals who used the tragedy to push that people should take climate change seriously, or to call out Rand Paul for wanting disaster aid for his own state while denying it to others.
From these quotes, the author then concludes that liberals are bloodthirsty elites who want republicans dead, whereas, my takeaway was some liberals are idiots who don’t know a tasteful time and place to talk about climate change. Here’s the exact quote from the article:
It’s a tragedy. For normal people, thoughts and prayers rang out. For liberals, they chortled and loved that these people were dead. Why? Well, it’s Kentucky. It’s Republican, though they have a Democratic governor in Andy Beshear. It’s a place where these people don’t go because liberals only care about urban-based settings, which isn’t America — at all. There are people who live in places that aren’t dominated by these snobby, condescending cretins.
Townhall article by Matt Vespa
And… like, this level of antipathy towards liberals (not to mention the baked in assumption that liberals are not “normal) was completely unsupported by the quotes he picked. Honestly, given how he probably went out of his way to search for the most damning liberal tweets, I’m surprised he couldn’t find anything worse. In fact, what he said about liberals was far more inflammatory than anything they said about conservatives.
Which, brings me to my point that, no matter how well liberals behave at this point, some conservatives¹ will always call us condescending, they will always say we are snobby, or elite, and so there’s really no countering it at this point. If you’re a snooty liberal, I wouldn’t bother changing your behavior; it won’t get you anywhere.
In fact, I believe there is a change of consciousness that needs to happen in the liberal mindset that is very similar to the change of consciousness that people experiencing emotional abuse need to undergo in order to make sense of these situations.
When people are being emotionally abused, often their abuser is constantly insulting them or their behavior. The abuser will accuse their partner of being irrational, or too loud, or too soft, or too sensitive, or being stupid, or whatever. And so, the abused person will keep trying to change their behavior, but they will never succeed; they will never find a behavior that keeps their abuser happy.
And, the path to freedom comes for the abused when they realize there is nothing they can do to make their abuser happy. The abuser wants to dominate, and so, anything their partner does will be criticized because criticism is the end goal. For an abuser, criticizing their partners feels good, that’s why they do it.
Similarly, for conservatives, criticizing liberals feels good. It is the end goal, they’re not looking for any improvement or change to the current situation. So, no matter what liberals do, they will be criticized by conservatives; there is no winning and no appeasing them.
In both cases, this criticism isn’t necessarily based on the criticized’s true behavior; it is based solely on the criticizer’s desire to dominate, and any pretense at rational discourse is used only to obfuscate this true motive.
Or, to phrase it another way, some conservatives love to go on about how condescending liberals are (sometimes even inciting violence in the process) so no matter how nice, and open minded, and non-condescending liberals try to act, they’ll keep saying it.
If we add to this the unfortunate reality that a lie repeated enough times becomes a truth in the public eye, there is no way for liberals to become “less condescending” — at least, for as long as conservatives decide to keep this rhetoric up.
Perhaps, a more interesting question is, how did the narrative of the “condescending liberal” come to be? One option is that, sometimes, liberals really were condescending and I’m open to that idea
Another possibility, however, is that conservatives feel a lot of shame and they are externalizing that shame, blaming other people for inciting that emotion in them even though those other people might have done nothing.
One place I’ve seen a similar dynamic come up before is with victim blaming with respect to rape. I don’t really hear this argument much in the US anymore, but historically people used to argue that a woman was “asking” to get raped if she dressed sexy or attractive. More recently, in Senegal, a public commentator Songué Diouf expressed a more quotable soundbite on this mindset:
[P]hilosophy professor and public commentator Songué Diouf claimed … that women get raped because of the way they behave and dress. “You do everything so that we rape you, and when we rape you, we go to prison and you who have done everything so that you are raped, you continue to be free”
Al Jazeera article on rape culture in Senegal
Where I believe the confusion lies, is that people like Diouf don’t understand that just because he feels a certain way toward a woman, it doesn’t mean the woman intended to provoke those feelings in him. Or, more explicitly in this case, if a man is turned on by a woman he sees, he assumes she must have been intending to turn him on. However, in her mind, she’s just walking to the grocery store or whatever. It’s a very self centered view of the world, that is probably common in adolescents but you’d hope people would grow out of.
(It is worth nothing, that clothing style isn’t actually linked to any increase in being sexually assaulted, and being scantily clad is not a risk factor for getting raped.)
At its core, this misunderstanding stems from a poor concept of mind in others, or to some degree, an inability to distinguish what’s happening internally for you with what’s happening internally from someone else.
So, applying this rationale to conservatives, conservatives may be feeling a lot of shame — for many reasons, not least of which is, in my opinion everyone nowadays (conservative, liberal, or neither) feels tons of shame all the time in American society. Perhaps, in particular, conservatives are feeling shame for some reason in comparison to liberals (If this is true, I’m not really sure why it might be, but it could have to do with college — having a college degree is a strong predicting differentiator between someone being conservative or liberal and is also something society gives respect to. For the record, I think college is somewhat overrated myself.)
But anyway, if conservatives are feeling shame in comparison to liberals for some reason, they might believe liberals were looking down on them. They may be getting their feelings mixed up with liberal people’s intentions.
Anyway; obviously this is all speculation. Not only am I not conservative, but I know relatively few conservatives personally. However, I do have reason to suspect that toxic shame is a huge driving force towards our current political divide — not least of which is, shame tends to be a driver of violence which sure seems to be spiking right now. (I did a video a little while ago about the link between violence and shame — I should write about it too, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.)
So, what’s the end result? Well, I continue to believe that conquering the epidemic of shame in American society is one of the more available ways out of our current political turbulence, but obviously that’s a big ask because most people don’t like thinking about or engaging with shame. And, I’m sure if any conservatives read this they’ll think I’m hella condescending, but I don’t really care at this point. Truth is, I actually don’t think I look down on conservatives; I certainly view them to be subject to a large number of fallacies and untruths, but liberals are also subject to a large number of fallacies and untruths. And, at the end of the day, I think where you’re born, the beliefs of your family, and the beliefs of who you currently associate with are far more likely to shape your worldview than most rational discourse is — which is perhaps unfortunate, but also to some degree not chosen.
So, how can you blame people for their beliefs if they didn’t actually have any agency in choosing them? That’s a controversial opinion, and perhaps a topic best left for another day.
¹ I was careful to say “some” conservatives here, because I actually do not believe the majority of Americans fall into either the far right or far left camp, and so there are many people who likely identify as conservative who do not exhibit this behavior
